


all their words for glory

by mapped



Category: Black Sails
Genre: (The knifeplay is very very mild), 4x10, Blow Jobs, Episode Tag, Knifeplay, M/M, Pirate Kink, Post-Finale, Post-Series, Reunion Sex, mentions of silver/flint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 14:12:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10572930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapped/pseuds/mapped
Summary: Thomas tries to make James understand that he loves all of him, and yes, that includes Flint.(Also, Thomas may have a bit of a pirate kink.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Partly inspired by [this delightful post](http://reluming.tumblr.com/post/159196502551/dont-you-think-that-thomas-would-be-at-least-a). 
> 
> Let’s entertain the fantasy that since the plantation overseers have no problem letting James and Thomas kiss for ages in the middle of a field they’re gonna have no problem letting them wander off for hours either. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Title from Bastille - 'Glory'.

When they have had their fill of kissing, giddy from the sensation of each other’s lips and beards and hands, Thomas says, “You’re alive.”

“They told you I was dead?” James says, stricken.

Trying not to let himself hope that two people can return from the dead at once and failing, Thomas replies, “Yes, and Miranda too.”

James winces, and Thomas feels a fresh slash of grief in his chest. He closes his eyes and remembers the softness of her hair, the cool silk of her dresses, the weight of her head resting upon his shoulder. Long nights discussing the heroines of Greek tragedies, luminous evenings listening to her elegant playing on the harpsichord.

James is squeezing his hand. “Thomas, we must talk. There’s so much I need to tell you.”

Thomas opens his eyes. “Of course,” he says. “We’ll—I’ll show you my living quarters.”

He leads James to the house where he sleeps, eight beds to a room. It is deserted during the daytime. Once the door is closed behind them, Thomas pulls James to him again, longing to do nothing but kiss James for the rest of the day, for the rest of his life, but James shoves him away, as gently as one can shove anything away.

“Talking,” James says, rubbing his hand over his face as he sits down heavily on a bed. “That was the goal.” He looks as though he’d rather sleep for a week instead of open his mouth again, however. “I cannot… I cannot allow you to go on touching me for a moment longer until you know the truth of what I have been doing for the last ten years.”

As much as he yearns to be as close to James as possible, Thomas sits down on the bed opposite, to give James space, and to be able to see James’ expressions easily. James’ face has always been louder than his words, or his actions. “Go ahead,” he says.

So then James begins to talk, and he talks for the better part of the day, until the light from outside becomes a faded gold. James doesn’t look at Thomas through most of his lengthy narrative, but his face is constantly quivering, the way a fish taken out of the water jerks and jumps until it dies.

“I know I have committed atrocities,” James says, when the tale is coming to an end. “And I do not presume that you will forgive me, or that you will still want me now that I have confessed my crimes. But as I said to Miranda once, I have been ready to return Flint to the sea for a long time. And now I can at last do that. I can return Flint to the sea, and walk inland and find my peace with you. If you’ll have me.”

James stops and licks his lips, looking at Thomas like he’s kneeling in church, waiting for his wafer and wine.

It is a lot to take in, but Thomas is completely certain about one thing at least. He is not repulsed. He still looks at the man before him and wants him just as much as he has ever done, from the moment they met in London ten years ago. He still loves James just as much as when James stood up at the dinner table and told Thomas’ father to get out of the house. But he is also… angry. It perplexes him at first. He tries to envision James killing his father, as James has described it, wondering if that what he’s angry at. He tries to envision James running Peter through with a sword. Snapping a friend’s neck. In his mind’s eye he sees James’ hands slick with blood, James snarling and panting and wild, unstoppable. Nothing like the man sitting before him now, hoping for absolution.

Then he realises he is not angry at James for what James has done in the past ten years, but at what James is trying to do _now_.

He considers this realisation, pokes and prods it until it assumes a more comprehensible form.

“If I were taken away from you again, right now,” he says, slowly as his thought gathers momentum, “can you say that you would not do whatever you could, kill whomever you must, to avenge my loss? Can you say that you would not drain all the world of its blood in my name? Can you say that you would not resume the mantle of Captain Flint and go forth and make the seas run red once more?”

James stares at him. 

“I thought so,” Thomas says. “Flint is not something you conjured out of nothing and can discard at will. He is just one facet of you, one facet of what your love for me looks like. And I will not reject you, or your love for me. It is every single facet of a gem that together makes it glittering and beautiful.”

James stands up abruptly, as if he can’t bear to sit still anymore. “It is hardly _beautiful_ , what I have done—”

“No,” Thomas says, getting to his feet too, to mirror James. “You have extinguished many lives. But I am not about to let you pretend that that part of you doesn’t exist anymore just because you have found me again. If you close your eyes and think of what England has done to you, to Miranda, to me, you’ll find that rage trembling just beneath the surface and it’ll always be there. But even though it is there, even though it will _never_ go away, you are not a monster. James, you looked at a man with one leg and a past he wouldn’t share with you even though you had shared yours, and you called him the _best_ of you. You looked at a dark-skinned woman, the daughter of slaves, and you would have made her queen of the entire world. You fought for a world in which her people might be free, and you never allowed anything to come to pass which might jeopardise their position against their will, even if it might mean you would gain an advantage. You respected and loved those who would expect dismissal at best and outright cruelty at worst from men who look like you.”

“I _have_ been ruthless and cruel,” James says. “I have shot innocent people in cold blood. I have reduced an entire city to ashes.” 

“You love Mr Silver even though you do not know his past,” Thomas says, and though anguish flashes through James’ face the way a candle flame wavers in the wind, he nods warily. “And you would love him even if he told you the entirety of it and it turns out he had engineered some of those unending horrors himself.”

“We knew and supported each other through all the horrifying things we had both done,” James says. “I cannot imagine what he could reveal about his past that would make me feel any differently towards him. Not that any of this matters because I am never—” his voice catches— “going to see him again.”

Thomas grips James’ arm. At some point, but not right now, he’ll deal with James’ silly insistence that he and Silver will never see each other again, when a reunion between the two of them does not seem at all an impossibility to Thomas, especially given the very impossible things that have happened of late. “Then you must understand that I love you. I know that this will always be a part of you and I love you. You are James McGraw, son of a carpenter, grandson of a fisherman, once a rising star in the Royal Navy, once my liaison to the Admiralty, my truest love. You are Captain Flint, a pirate, murderer of my father, of Peter, the fury that razed Charles Town to the ground for my wife, and my truest love _still_ , now and forever. This darkness that is a part of you, it was a part of my wife too. I loved her and I miss her and if she were here she would help me make you understand this. I would not ask that you simply be James and not Flint, because you cannot. You are everything you have always been, and you came back to me. You do not have to be anything other than what you are.”

Looking at James’ face is like looking at a bleeding wound; the blood is emotion, spilling and spilling. Thomas wants to catch it all in his open hands and drink from it.

“You dreamt of being Odysseus, did you not?” he asks. “Of letting your oar become a shovel? Well, you are my Odysseus. My cunning man, my man of twists and turns, my much-enduring man.” The Greek word for each epithet flits through Thomas’ mind as the English phrases leave his mouth, all these words that Homer applied to the hero who wandered over the seas, lost on a ten-year voyage after a ten-year war, before he finally found his way home and fell into his wife’s embrace. As he speaks, Thomas runs his hand up over James’ arm and lays his hand over James’ heart, thinking of all that James has suffered, all the sorrows that have shaped him for the past ten years. He caresses James’ jaw with his other hand, James’ beard the down he would gladly make his bed in tonight and always. “My Odysseus,” he whispers, voice now low and liquid as the wine-dark sea, “my sacker of cities.”

He sees James shiver, the flicker of James’ gaze drawn helplessly to his lips. “Tell me, this is what you wore as a pirate, isn’t it?” Thomas asks, fingers playing with the collar of James’ shirt, stroking along the skin of James’ neck inside that collar.

“Yes,” James says, hoarsely. “I had a coat, too, but—”

“Leather?” Thomas asks.

“Sometimes,” James says.

“Wasn’t it too hot for that in the Bahamas?” 

James shrugs. “It suited,” he says.

“I’ll bet it did,” Thomas murmurs, picturing James in a black leather coat, fearsome and bloodstained. James flushes, looking so much like dawn that it wakes every part of Thomas, including that same hollow ache in his belly as when he rises from bed in the morning and hungers for the taste of bread on his tongue.

“If you hadn’t been sent here as a captive,” Thomas says, “if you had learnt that I was trapped here and there was no means of getting to me except by force, would you not have resorted to violence?”

James nods. “I would have… I would have killed anyone who stood in the way of me seeing you again.” He looks devastated to admit this, the muscles in his face twitching and his brow as tightly knit as a Gordian knot, but he has admitted it.

“So,” Thomas says. “A sword?”

“A sword,” James agrees. “And a pistol. And knives.”

“Knives,” Thomas repeats.

“Yes. At least two. Occasionally three.”

“And you do not have any on you right now?”

James bites his lip, and then he bends and draws out a small knife from his boot.

Thomas stares at it, at the glinting blade, at James’ hand wrapped around the handle. “Did you ever put a knife to Mr Silver’s throat?” he asks, softly.

“Why—” James says, and then gives up. “Yes. We fenced. I had a sword at his throat many times.”

“But before that,” Thomas says. “Before you became friends. When you spoke of the beginning of your acquaintance with him, it sounded very antagonistic to me. You never put a knife to his throat in earnest?”

“I did,” James says, eyes flicking to the side, lost in the memory. “When we were taking the Spanish warship. He did something that seemed so fucking stupid. I was afraid he would sabotage all our efforts, and I rounded on him in frustration.”

“But then you came to love him,” Thomas says.

“Yes,” James says. “I did.”

“Put the knife to my throat,” Thomas says, quietly, “like you did his.”

James’ eyes slide to Thomas’ throat. He blinks, and then in an overwhelming instant, Thomas finds himself thrown back against the wall, his neck bared to the sharp blade. He’s taller than James, but even so, James looms in his intensity, like a great black cloud overhead. Thomas’ heart thuds in a sunken moment of terror, like seeing a vein of lightning cleave the sky and knowing that thunder is inevitable and just a breath away.

“Like this,” James murmurs, looking into Thomas’ eyes before his gaze slips inexorably down to Thomas’ lips. _Like this._ Had it been like this with Mr Silver, too? Had James been attracted to him, wanted to kiss him even as he held a knife to his throat?

Thomas suspects that it was so.

The terror blooms into something else, something just as keen and thrilling. James is pressed so close, and he keeps looking at Thomas’ mouth, and God help him, those eyes have always been so beautiful. In London, Thomas barely saw any green, but here in the plantation he is surrounded by it, and every day he has thought of James’ eyes. Every field has been sown with his remembrance of them. Here they are now before him, much more vivid than memory, fixated on his lips. And James’ beard, the shade of it sweet as cinnamon, a luxury Thomas has not enjoyed in ten years. The silver stud that sparkles on James’ earlobe, something new. 

“I know who you are, James,” Thomas says, cupping James’ cheek, smoothing his thumb over the scar there, while the hairs of James’ beard graze the heel of his palm. “ _Flint_.” James’ whole body shudders, and his eyelids flutter as he leans into Thomas’ touch. “You are the man who killed for me, for my wife, and you would kill again if you had to. I do not flinch from any part of you. You are never going to be able to let Flint go. It is better if you accept that now, so that it does not trouble you when you realise that he is still as much a part of you as he has ever been. As he has been before you even met me.”

A bell chimes outside, calling the labourers to dinner. Thomas would gladly forgo dinner and sustain himself on the sight of James alone. He shifts a little, carefully so that the blade at his throat does not cut, until he has one of his legs between James’, and James grinds against his thigh, a tremulous sound floating from his lips as he does, as his gaze keeps hovering between Thomas’ eyes and his knife still poised over Thomas’ neck.

“Yes,” Thomas encourages, “my love, yes.”

His hands clutch at James’ waist, and he feels the scattering of cold points on his hands, the metal inlay on James’ broad leather belt. Oh _yes_ , that belt. “I want to kneel for you, dearest,” he says, and James audibly inhales before removing the knife, dropping it on the bed next to them. Thomas takes the opportunity to surge forward and kiss James while James continues to rock against his thigh. James gasps into his mouth, and James tastes like home, smells like home, feels like home. Thomas kisses the corner of his mouth and then whispers in his ear, “And when I kneel, know that I am kneeling for Captain Flint, too, because you are always going to be him as well.” He cannot resist letting his tongue lap at the glittering stud in James’ ear, teasing the tip of James’ earlobe between his teeth, and James’ hands tighten in his hair.

He sinks to his knees, and he wouldn’t be surprised if he just evaporated in that moment and turned to steam in the air, when confronted with the vision before him. That _belt_. James’ incredibly tight trousers, his hardness evident and straining, his thighs thick and filling the fabric so perfectly. The lovely hint of James’ belly above the belt. Thomas unbuckles the belt, sorry to see it go, but then he gladly untucks James’ shirt, pushes it up until he can kiss the soft skin of James’ belly, the slight fuzz of hair below his navel.

He looks up at James, who watches him ravenously, holding the hem of his shirt up for Thomas as he unbuttons those trousers and tugs them down, and then James’ cock is there in front of him. He rubs his cheek against it and breathes deep. “You must be the most gorgeous pirate in the whole world,” he says, his voice shaking a little as he gazes upon James’ milky, freckled thighs, feels them hot and powerful under his hands, and James makes a broken noise above him. He kisses the head of James’ cock, and swallows it into his mouth, moaning at the way it stretches his lips. He had forgotten, but oh, it’s such a _wonderful_ ache, the weight of it so right on his tongue.

He sucks James’ cock, watching James above him, the pleasure rippling through James’ face, James crying out his name. James, cleverer than Odysseus, stronger, so much more capable, so much more steadfast. A hero. And yet like all Greek heroes he is flawed, and good at killing, and he has left a bloody trail in his wake.

And Thomas wants him, all of him. James, his godlike warrior, his sacker of cities.

When he thinks of Miranda with a bullet hole in her head, her last words a desire to see the city she was in _burn_ , he cannot blame James for Charles Town at all, or for anything that came after that.

He works James’ cock urgently, his hand fast where his lips do not reach, stroking himself with his other hand, too overcome by the sensation of James in his mouth, by the desperate crush of love in his heart for this man who is so tender and so deadly, who is nothing like the man he fell in love with and yet shockingly recognisable. That the softness is still there, buried under so much bloody ruin and debris, just makes it all the more precious and breathtaking.

When James comes, hips stuttering, flooding Thomas’ mouth with wet warmth, Thomas savours every drop of it. He nuzzles James’ thighs, nibbling the skin there almost lazily as he brings himself to completion, sighing into the fine mist of freckles.

He stays on his knees a moment longer, just breathing the scent of James, and then he wipes his hand on a rag and hauls James, boots and all, onto the nearest bed with him.

“We’re not going to stay here,” James says. “You do not deserve to be imprisoned for a day longer.”

“Hush,” Thomas says, brushing his thumb over James’ lips. “I have a plan. But right now I would quite like to simply rest here with you. You can slaughter all the other suitors later.”

“What other suitors?” James asks, suddenly alarmed. Thomas laughs, and laughs some more at James’ indignant expression.

He drags his nose through James’ beard, peppering the underside of James’ jaw with kisses, and James persists, “There really aren’t any other suitors though, are there?”

“You’re one to talk,” Thomas mutters. “What about your Mr Silver?”

“I told you we’re never—”

“Hush,” Thomas says again, batting at James’ chin as he settles his head upon James’ chest, the rhythm of James’ heart the most comforting sound he has ever heard. “All of that later. There’s no need to concern yourself, my love, none of my other suitors could be any match for you. You are a more marvellous hero than Odysseus, after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are really appreciated! <3 Come find me on [tumblr](http://reluming.tumblr.com/) where I am having a great time in FlintHamilton heaven and SilverFlint hell. :')

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [my great teller of tales](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11891043) by [thenightpainter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenightpainter/pseuds/thenightpainter)




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